The House of Saud’s sectarian venom spreads across Middle East / David Gardner

The ruling family,
having incited Sunni-Shia conflict, will not be able to control it

It is hard to see
how Saudi Arabia’s New Year execution spree will send the signal it
presumably intended: that of an absolute monarchy on which the sun
will never set, laying down the law on its own terms with a
sanguinary warning to would-be predators at home and abroad. It
looks, instead, like a defensive message that injects yet more
sectarian venom into the cauldron of the Middle East. That poison is
not something the House of Saud or the Wahhabi clerical establishment
that legitimises it can control, as the Sunni-Shia conflict they help
incite keeps ripping the region apart.

Ever since last
year’s nuclear deal between international powers led by the US and
Iran, the kingdom’s arch-rival, started to look unstoppable, Saudi
leaders appear to have reached three conclusions. Yes, they have been
outplayed diplomatically and feel let down by their long-term
American ally and patron. To their north — and in good part because
of what they see as US bungling and lack of backbone, first in Iraq
and then Syria — Tehran has cut a Shia arc through Arab lands from
Baghdad to Beirut. They have repeatedly told Washington they regard
what they see as Iran’s spearheading of a Shia jihad in the region
as a greater threat than the Sunni jihadi menace of Isis.

Thus Riyadh seems
determined to ensure any Iran-backed incursion into the Gulf is off
limits. The message is that the Arabian peninsula is terra sancta for
(Sunni) Islam, which the House of Saud presumes to lead worldwide.
There will be no Persian encroachment, and no quarter for local Shia
— always abominated as idolaters by Wahhabi bigots but long seen by
the Saudi government as fifth columnists for an Iran radicalised by
its 1979 Islamic Revolution. The already dim prospect of a negotiated
transition out of Syria’s civil war fades in the burning light of
rekindled Saudi-Iranian enmity.

King Salman, who
succeeded to the throne last year, underlined the message by
launching a war in March in neighbouring Yemen against insurgent Shia
Houthi forces. But, in case there was any ambiguity, Saudi Arabia has
now executed Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, an outspoken cleric from the
kingdom’s oil-rich eastern province, where the Shia are a majority.
Nimr had long campaigned for the civil, religious and political
rights that the Saudi state systematically denies its Shia. He
unequivocally condemned violence yet he was executed as a terrorist.
That 43 Sunni jihadis were simultaneously put to death, for bloody
crimes of which they were convicted more than a decade ago, is seen
by many Saudi Shia — an estimated 3m people — as cover for a
political assassination they regard as a declaration of war.

They will be
confirmed in this view by mainstream and social media commentary
across the Gulf that drips with anti-Shia vitriol. There is, it is
true, also contrasting opinion that emphasises conventional wisdom
about how Sunni and Shia have rubbed along fine for centuries,
intermingled and even intermarried, reached compromises and avoided
catastrophes, and so on. Even though this is the standard discourse
of Arab tyrants who have failed to build inclusive nations, it is not
wrong — just, alas, irrelevant at a time when sectarian demons have
been unleashed across the region.

The ruling House of
Saud and its Wahhabi backers have been primary disseminators of a
puritan brand of muscular and exclusivist Sunni Islam, not just in
Arab countries but across the Islamic world. Killing Nimr opens
another compartment of this Pandora’s box — and at a time of
their vulnerability rather than strength.

The ruling family
has shown extraordinary resilience over the past four decades: in the
face of dislocating transformation at home from a desert kingdom
forged by the sword to an oil titan and regional power; and against
challenges whether from pan-Arab nationalists or rival brands of
Islamism.

But three of the
things they relied on — slow but steady decision-making, family
cohesion and limitless cash — now seem in short supply. The oil
price has crashed and reserves are being drawn down. Policy is in the
hands of Mohammed bin Salman, the dynamic but untried deputy crown
prince and favourite son of the ailing king, who even supporters say
risks challenge from his royal peers. He is also embarking on an
overhaul of the kingdom’s clientelist and paternalist economic
management — by slashing energy subsidies, for example.

Such reform is long
overdue. But it is a narrative that speaks of limited reform as a
technocratic bypass for intractable political and social problems.
These problems will not go away. And the new leadership has not only
gone on an expensive offensive abroad — from Yemen to Syria, and in
billions of dollars of support for its Sunni allies from Egypt to
Bahrain — but opened a new front at home.

Underlying it all,
the bloody example the Saudis have made of Nimr, and their alarmed
and bellicose response to Iranian swaggering across the Arab world,
continue to give the impression that the House of Saud and the
Wahhabis are competing with the radical jihadis of Isis as to who is
best placed to keep down the Shia.